Today's customers are more connected than ever. With customer experience overtaking price and product as the key brand differentiator, building an online community to engage customers is key to sustaining a vibrant brand. However, of the 86% of companies seeking to excel at customer experience, only 27% even qualify as “good” in the eyes of their customers. Most companies struggle to deliver valuable interaction because the systems that run their business are disconnected from their online customer experience. Customers can see a website or forum, but their experiences aren’t personalized, making it difficult to solve a problem or find the information they need.

Salesforce first introduced Community Cloud in 2013, allowing companies to extend their brand experience through vibrant communities of customers. By combining social engagement with CRM data, Community Cloud made it possible to deliver the right information to consumers, at the right time. And today, Salesforce continues to raise the bar with Lightning Customer Community, the most advanced and intelligent community platform available. The re-imagined Lightning Customer Community includes new features such as:
Lightning Themes: Companies can now create a visually-rich and highly personalized user experience. The entire look and feel of any community can be completely customized to deliver an immersive, unique and branded experience, on any device.
Rich Media Feed: Similar to Facebook feeds, users can now embed videos, images, file link previews and even code snippets into any community feed. The new Rich Media Feed also provides a Q&A-like environment similar to Quora that makes it easier to find the answer a user is looking for.
Recommended Articles and Answers: Companies can curate a personalized experience for every customer. Recommended Articles and Answers uses intelligent scoring to instantly deliver the most relevant articles and answers based on the search query.
Search Optimization: Companies can more effectively surface community content in web search results and direct queries to relevant community discussions. For example, if a customer is searching the web for what size coffee filter to buy for their new coffee pot, Search Optimization can better surface links that bring the customer to the location in a community where their question is most likely to be answered—either by the manufacturer, a subject matter expert or another coffee enthusiast in the community.
Smart Moderation: Community managers can proactively identify and eliminate any spam and unwanted posts. Additionally, Smart Moderation uses intelligent routing to create cases in Lightning Customer Community and direct them to Service Cloud Lightning, enabling agents to respond to customers immediately.
Lightning Reports and Dashboards: With more than 250 new Lightning Reports and Dashboards, community managers are armed with real-time insights into customer trends such as purchasing patterns, top content, escalations and community traffic to make sure they are delivering a personalized and rich customer experience.

Extending e-Commerce Capability with new Lightning Components from the Salesforce Partner Ecosystem
Powered by the Salesforce Lightning Platform, companies can now drag-and-drop new e-commerce functionality into community pages faster than ever with three new partner-built Lightning Components:
CloudCraze CartPlus: Enables B2B companies to drag-and-drop a native shopping cart anywhere in their community, making it easy for customers to buy products within one channel of engagement.
OSF UnifyCOMMERCE Demandware: Integrates Demandware’s B2C e-commerce services into any community, allowing companies to provide single sign-on capability, a persistent shopping cart that is always present wherever the customer is, sync customer data and embed the Demandware Customer Service Suite—allowing customer service agents to place orders on behalf of customers.
OSF UnifyCOMMERCE Magento: Connects Magento’s e-commerce services into any community, allowing companies to synchronize customer records, orders and reviews from Magento directly in Salesforce. Additionally, companies have access to built-in reporting that provides insight into customers’ shopping activity such as order value, number of orders and product reviews.

Comments on the news:
"In today's connected world, customers expect every experience to be fast, personal and seamless," said Mike Micucci, GM and SVP, Salesforce Community Cloud. "The new Lightning Customer Community is connected directly into the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, providing companies with the intelligence needed to exceed expectations and build deeper relationships with their customers."
“We are responsible for piecing together billions of historical records every day, and delivering a fast and personal experience for each of our customers,” said Andrew Watt, Vice President, Member Services, Ancestry. “With Customer Lightning Community, we will be able to leverage a whole new platform that will allow our customers to form deeper connections with one another, unearth even more insights and discoveries with relatives and share their stories.”

Pricing & Availability
Lightning Customer Community is generally available today with the purchase of any Community Cloud license.
Partner-built Lightning Components from CloudCraze and OSF Global Services are generally available today. For more information on each Lightning Component, please visit the Salesforce AppExchange.

Additional Information
Learn more about the Salesforce Community Cloud: http://www.salesforce.com/communities/overview/

Connect with Salesforce
Like Salesforce and Salesforce Community Cloud on Facebook.
Follow @salesforce and @communitycloud on Twitter.

About Salesforce
Salesforce, the Customer Success Platform and world's #1 CRM, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit:www.salesforce.com.

Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase Salesforce applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM." For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

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About Salesforce

Salesforce, the global CRM leader, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit: www.salesforce.com.

Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase Salesforce applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “CRM.” For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.